Tuesday, 24 January 2017

Well, it’s been a while.
A thousand apologies. I had fallen down a well.

I have to admit that the
idea of non-fiction as such doesn’t have the same power to compel me. Already
its diction seems to constrain it, defined via negativa – what it is,
well, it isn’t fiction. Immediately, maybe, it is cast into shadow because of
this. I have heard good things about H is for hawk (in fact, it was a
present that I gave to my brother – a bird obsessive – years back), about The
Argonauts, and indeed I studied Portrait with Keys at university – a
great book, indeed.

I have been trying to
think why this is, and provide a genealogy, and examine whether it is something
that pertains to me, something that pertains to non-fiction, or some mixture of
both. Perhaps, it is simply because the tradition is larger, and there is so
much to read anyway. So much to read. Or possibly, it is something else more
definitional at play here. I’m not really fussed about non-fiction as such,
because I’m not really fussed about fiction as such. The question is,
and should always be: is the writing good? And by the writing, I mean both on
the level of the sentences, and the larger structures that the sentences go
together to create. Now you can debate what ‘good’ is, but it is quality that
matters – but this is what you’re saying, no? This applies to genre too.
Whether it be recounting the life of a bourgeois woman in 1920s London or a
future society in which we worship Our Ford doesn’t matter. It simply and only
has to be good. And indeed both Mrs Dalloway and Brave New World
are excellent. I studied Portrait with Keys alongside A Secret Agent,
Ulysses and Good Morning Midnight; I wasn’t really aware of it as
non-fiction. Taxonomies in this case can work against the
reader rather than help. So often taxonomies are the province of the obsessive
and completist, and better for museums and dead things.

My own reading is
haphazard at the moment: there is De Troyes Arthurian Romances,there
is DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, and all the while I’m also in the belly
of Moby-Dick.

I’m looking forward to
(among many – as always, there is an avalanche of them) two books in
particular, Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth and Malcolm Lowry’s The Voyage
That Never Ends. I have read their two central works, Invisible Man (1952)and Under the Volcano (1947), and my oncoming reading is, in effect,
all that they could manage after. Both of them had epics mapped out, but what
we have are aborted attempts, premature births, limbs. This happens sometimes,
it seems. Christopher “I’m . . . a writer” Isherwood envisaged epics, but
mostly ended up cobbling together his novels from fragments. Truman Capote much
advertised his Answered Prayers to be an American In Search of Lost
Time, but it never really materialised. Lowry had an idea for a cycle of
novels (the number projected seems to have been possibly three, or possibly
five, or possibly seven). In some ways, Michael Hoffman’s description of this
cycle in the introduction sounds almost like, if only superficially, Lawrence
Durrell’s Avignon Quintet (an underrated remarkable work) in its self
referentiality. The book The Voyage That Never Ends is made up of
fragments and extracts that were intended to one day form this larger non-existent
effort. Ralph Ellison wrote Juneteenth for years and years from 1954 to
his death in 1994. There is something appealing about reading these unfinished
posthumous works. Apart from the standard literary pleasure, there’s the
sadness at what could have been, but also perhaps a certain morbid fascination.

One constant in my
reading for a while now, I think, has been following where the river flowed
after the initial white rapids of what we might call literary modernism. We
have those central figures: Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Faulkner. And then the
river rushes through and on and under, picking up new and different sediments,
flashing over different landscapes. I got my dousing rod, and followed. I
listened out for those slightly less known, like Henry Green, Ford Maddox Ford,
Dos Passos, or simply those who came later and still carried that modernist
roar of the twenties, like Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry. More recently,
James Hanley, Henry Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Bernhard, Henry Green (again),
Mario Vargos Llosa, Thomas Pynchon. I want to read Döblin, Broch, Quin, Cary,
Cortizar, Lispector, Toomer. Maureen Duffy (who you recommended) too.

There is something about
the sensibility and energy of these works that has a powerful hold on my
imagination. (Had you guessed?) I don’t want to necessarily theorise about this
(though I could try), nor make a case for their superiority to other works
(because does that get us anywhere?). But I think this perhaps gets closer to
that luminosity that I mentioned before.

I look at the lists
above. Who is the obsessive and completist now? The line from DeLillo about
lists being a form of cultural hysteria comes to mind. A cultured cultural
cultish hysteria.

Saturday, 21 January 2017

Rather
wonderfully, the literal meaning of the Yiddish word for thesaurus, אוצר (oytser), is treasure. For
someone who has been known to read a thesaurus for fun, discovering this was a rare moment of
cultural resonance, when the name of an object captured not only its
function but my emotional reaction to it. Of course, there’s an echo of this in English,
where a collection of literature can be called a treasury, but somehow אוצר is even more direct about the joy to be found in language and the
building of meaning.

The אוצר I have is the one produced
by Nahum Stutchkoff in 1950 and it’s a hearty breezeblock of a book. Given the size of it I’m not surprised that
there’s only ever been one reprint edition, since a 940-page exploration of
what was then a fading language would have been a challenging sell. Luckily, this book was
built to last. Mine is one of the 1950
ones and it’s printed on the type of heavy paper that has a lot to say for
itself – there’s plenty of crackling and chatter when you turn the pages. You know that sound, like when you flex a really
fat telephone directory in your hands? It’s
that, as though the words are trying to speak themselves. This אוצר is bound in heavy green book linen with gold
lettering, and they even marbled the page edges for crying out loud. It might be 67 years old, but this book still
shows up almost everything else on the shelves.

The 1991 reprint edition of Stutchkoff's אוצר

I bought my copy of Stutchkoff’s אוצר on eBay for $27, from some guy in West Virginia. He might not have realised what a treasure he
had but someone somewhere took mighty good care of this book. I’ve not been able to find a single blemish on
its pages, not one spot of foxing and not a single rip. It’s the kind of volume you’d expect to see in
a library, but this one has no labels or stamps, no inscriptions or marginalia.
The covers are worn where it’s been
sitting on the shelf, but beyond that it looks like it’s gone unread for most
of its life. Happily, not anymore.

This אוצר was one of the very first
Yiddish books I bought, almost two years ago, back when I was slowly
piecing words together on the page. I
was still freaking out about the cost of the postage as I was unwrapping it, but
this is one of those books that can silence all doubts. I might have struggled to read it back then,
but now this one volume is probably the most comprehensive representation of
the Yiddish language that I could ever find.

Just like a Roget’s Thesaurus, Stutchkoff’s אוצר is organised according to categories, and like Roget’s it starts with
the big existential ones, namely Being (zayn) and Not-Being (nit-zayn). Clearly Stutchkoff wanted Yiddish to be
represented with as much seriousness as all the other European languages, not
as some inconsequential זשאַרגאָן (zshargon/jargon). He divided the entire shprakh into 620 categories of concepts, everything from elements
to wild animals to music to foods to emotions, then he absolutely went to town.
Now that I can read and understand great
swathes of this book, I can see that there is real gold in the sheer
linguistic variety that Stutchkoff recorded.

Officially, the אוצר contains over 150,000
words, concepts and phrases, making it almost twice as comprehensive as my
largest Yiddish dictionary. There are
words in here that none of my Yiddish dictionaries have, and Stutchkoff has
been careful to track the different variants of Yiddish across its full linguistic
range. To use the section on blue (בלױ) as an example, there’s a huge array of detail that would be impossible
to find elsewhere. Not only does it list
the different ways of saying “blue”, depending on which version of Yiddish you
are using (bloy, blo, blov, azur, lazur), it also gives a wonderful range of
specific and recognisable blues, such asעלעקטריעבלױ (elektrie bloy), הימלבלױ (himl bloy) and אולטראַמאַרין (ultramarin). Then there’s the more mysterious
blues, such as קינדערבלױ (kinder bloy), which I can only guess would be pastel blue, or בערלינערבלױ (berliner bloy) and קאַדעטבלױ (kadet bloy), which sound
rather more like heritage paint shades.

Berliner blue has to be in here somewhere

However, it’s the similes that really deliver the
goods. As well as the expected bloy vi der yam (blue as the sea) and bloy vi der himl (blue as the sky), we
have bloy vi bliml tsvishn korn (blue
as a little flower amongst rye, presumably a cornflower), bloy vi a milb (blue as a moth), bloy vi a milts (blue as a spleen), bloy vi a gehangener (blue
as a hanged man) and, my own personal favourite, bloy vi mayne gesheftn. I’m
not entirely sure, but I think that last one means “blue as my deals”. I’m almost sure that it’s not obscene.

What I love about these similes is that they call up
a world in its own words, in the language that people spoke on the street and
in their homes. They add the fine detail
that has often been lost in standardized Yiddish, where bloy is usually just bloy.
Stutchkoff’s אוצר is the only one of its kind, a lifetime’s work, and perhaps the closest
we non-native speakers can get to understanding not only what we have already lost but also what there
is to rediscover.

Saturday, 14 January 2017

First of all, colossal
apologies for taking so long to reply to your last email.It’s been Christmas – you may well have
noticed – which necessitated a great deal of cooking, eating, washing up,
planning of the next meal, etc, etc.Besides that, an excellent crop of new books and movies has made its way
into the house, and I’ve been dipping into those with appetite and glee (Renata
Adler’s selected journalism, After the
Tall Timber, has been a highlight so far, and a lot of energy’s been poured
into clearing my schedule to watch Abel Gance’s five and half hour silent
masterpiece Napoleon, which the BFI
have just released in a new print)*, a fact which has necessitated ignoring the
outside world – or the close approximation of the outside world that the
interweb provides, at any rate – for the last couple of weeks.But rest assured!I have not neglected your previous missive,
and have been turning its more salient and meaty points over in my mind as best
I can between bouts of competitive potato-eating and Harry Potter marathons.

To address some of your
concerns: yes, you’re probably right that Woolf’s novels will outlast her
diaries and letters, without a doubt.Indeed, the diaries and letters as literary artefacts are explicitly
dependent upon the high critical regard in which the novels are held.(This is probably as true of other great
literary journal-keepers like John Cheever and James Schuyler and Christopher “I’m
. . . a writer” Isherwood, though the picture is greyed and blurred a little by
the Goncourt brothers, whose journals are afforded the serious attention and
respect which have long been denied their no-longer-read-at-all-by-anyone-anywhere-even-academics
novels.)Perhaps it’s simply a matter of
particularity, even perversity, on my part: I simply don’t want (or don’t think
I want) that sense of finish, of ‘luminosity’, that you’re seeking and finding
in Woolf’s work: I’m genuinely more interested in her quotidian thoughts on
what she’s reading at any given point, what she had for breakfast on Saturday,
the particularities of tiny mundane detail, provided for their own interest and
pleasure and nothing more.**

Perhaps, if I were in a
less controversial or contrarian mood – but when’s that ever likely to happen? –
I might temper my argument, and suggest that my impatience with ‘trad. fic’ –
and my concomitant drift towards the fringes (essays, diaries, novels that
break apart under the strain of their own construction) – is really in part a
reaction to a certain arrogance on the part of Fiction, considered as a
monolithic bloc: an arrogance that sees itself as the final arbiter of the ‘literary’,
and that views other forms not as important and vital genres in their own
right, but rather as little more than jerry-built adjuncts to Fiction’s self-confessed
pre-eminence in the field of Wordery.

That’s probably yet another
straw man, I’m sure – I should probably start charging by the penny, I’m
putting together so many hay-stuffed effigies: at this rate, by the end of the
month, I’ll have, well, some pennies, anyway – but I still think I’m raising something
resembling a valid point, however grumpily and idiosyncratically I might
express it.Why mine Woolf’s diaries for
what gems of information they can express about her ‘real’ work?Can’t we treat them as a pre-eminence in and
of themselves?Hmm?There was a very good article by Geoff Dyer
in the Guardian fairly recently (actually over a year ago now, but by my standards,
that’s recent) that touched on this issue.(You can read it here if you wish.)Dyer raises a whole host of other points
beside, but one of his observations struck me particularly, pertaining to the
differing values one expects, respectively, from fiction and non-fiction: fiction,
according to the schema Dyer lays out, is a refuge if you’re after style and
joy; non-fiction, however, can be viewed as a rather more austere and utilitarian
harbour, providing nought but facts and content.(The French Riviera vs. Portsmouth, basically.)“In a realm where style was often functional,”
writes Dyer, “nonfiction books were – are – praised for being “well written”,
as though that were an inessential extra, like some optional finish on a
reliable car.”

Dyer, of course, is
sketching out this clichéd view of non-fiction to provide a semi-ironic
backdrop for his advocacy of the more recent advances in the field – and many
of the names that get referenced in the article have popped up on my own radar,***
in many instances producing in the process some pretty unforgettable and
forthright emerald blips: yes, I am running this metaphor into the ground,
thank you for noticing – but I would say that this cliché does still pertain to
a certain extent.If I am overzealous in
my non-fiction boosterism, I feel it’s somewhat warranted: over-correction is
better than the complacency of no correction at all.

This reply, I realise, is
already radically breaching the limits of what’s reasonable, both quantitatively
and qualitatively, so I should probably sign off soon, but before I go, and as
a means of providing a little bit of gravy for the next mind-meal you send my
way, one of the books that snuck into the house over the festive break was The Storm (1704) by Daniel Defoe.I’ve only glanced at and dipped into it so far
– not least because it’s not actually mine, but my good lady’s, and there’s a
whole Byzantine edifice of social etiquette pertaining to the matter of who
gets to read books first in any given household, the complexity of which would
make a medieval Japanese nobleman’s head spin clean off his shoulders – but what’s
notable, aside from its subject matter, is the sense that Defoe is both
creating and defining a form, and simultaneously defending it aesthetically,
even as he calls it into being.We could
probably call that genre ‘long-form journalism’ or ‘literary non-fiction’, depending
on our mood, but whatever it is, it feels alarmingly contemporary.Discuss.

Yours, as ever,

Simon

PS: Happy New Year, by the
way!

*My hope is that there’s a
revolution-tinged secular holiday which is celebrated in France some time in
the next few weeks with which can coincide my screening of the movie, to really
make an event of it.I don’t want to
have to wait till Bastille Day, for God’s sake.

**I’m probably the only
reader – I’m certainly in a minority of readers, anyway – who gets far more
excited by technical details in a writer’s biography than the endless, prurient
cataloguing of their turbid emotional lives: how many words got written on
August 16th, say?; what kind of pens did they use, and where did
they buy them?; had they read Proust before or after they began work on their
third novel, etc, etc?

***Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys, in particular, is now
a personal favourite of mine: genuinely one of the best things I have read in
some years.I was planning to re-read it,
so that I could more properly answer your perfectly reasonable request for some
concrete detail regarding my reading habits and preferences, but realised I’d
lent the book to a friend – oh, the hubris! – and so can’t fulfil my duties in
this instance.Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, too, feels like a
game-changer, though everyone and their maiden aunt has written about that, and
extensively, so I’ll limit my comments to say simply that I enjoyed it
immensely.H is for Hawk, if you’ve not read it, should wing its way to your ‘must
read’ pile pretty soon, too.

Thursday, 12 January 2017

In a preamble, I would have to agree, re: the strawmanning of
academia. If we are to, as Trilling said, attempt to consider things complexly
it is necessary for me to acknowledge: there are many in literary departments
up and down the Archipelago doing good and interesting work, and that so with
passion. Indeed, I enjoyed my degree (in
the long ago days) immensely. Primarily,
I think my reservations are to do with: a) how this good and interesting work
is reaching the Commonweal as a whole*, b) if the modes of language used aren’t
a net (an Iris Murdochy–Under-the-Net-type-net) that traps and hampers
rather than frees, and c) if the strictures of academia, as currently
constructed, deprive (say, in the case of philosophy) us of figures like a
Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, a Plato.

But let’s refine your point further. You mentioned a certain
old-fashioned impulse to have the author be live and well on the page contra
Barthes, but simultaneously what you’re asking for is something that sounds
at least pretty modern, or at least postmodern. A foregrounding of the apparatus,
a self-consciousness. You want – in a
manner – a self-conscious text, perhaps not metafiction, but meta-nonfiction, a
metaessay (though, one assumes, not simply one that only describes its own
making, but is also about something else). You note an ennui, a distaste concerning “the
mechanics of outright fiction.” I
wondered if this had to do with an inauthenticity that you were tasting. Trilling wrote about the distinction between
sincerity and authenticity. Broadly, he says sincerity is about saying
out loud what is in your heart, and authenticity is to do with being oneself. Your insistence on the mess and stuff and
muddle is to ask for a kind of realism or authenticity. Simon says, Thoughts don’t come from nowhere. Simon says, Thoughts emerge from the mess, the
stuff and funk. Simon says, Show me
this. Is this that familiar move that we
have seen in our literature, the restless attempt to get at something truer or
‘real’, etc? So if modernism is (v
simplistically) the literature of consciousness (Joyce, Woolf etc), and
postmodernism (v simplistically) the literature of self-consciousness (Calvino
etc), this is a move away from fiction as such, toward a non-fiction that has
this awareness, this self-consciousness about how it is made? Is this a useful way to think about what
you’re saying? Or not? What does Simon say?

So far, the prime example you’ve given is Dept. of Speculation
(2014), which, broadly speaking, is a novel, and I think an example that is
more squarely in what we might call the essay would be helpful.

To add a discordant chime to your literary spidey-senses: your
particular thesis doesn’t hold – at least with the evidence you bring to bear. It is without question that, say, Woolf’s
diaries and letters are of very great worth**. Francis Spalding has, like you, speculated
that it is these that will last, and have the most value. I think this is a stretch – wonderful as they
are, the diaries and letters don’t exceed the brightness cast by the luminous
stream formed by Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927),
and The Waves (1932). Equal in value, perhaps, but they don’t outshine
her fiction. Bennet, I think, is fair
game here. (I don’t know enough about Simon Gray or Thoreau to say.) But are these representative figures? If one casts the net (not an Iris-Murdochy-Under-the-Net-type-net,
but a book-and-writer-nabbing-type-net) further, it isn’t clear to me that you
will dredge up enough driftwood you need to prop up your thesis. Your examples are journals, diaries. Things that are done in private, and may or
may not, have an intended audience beyond the writer themselves. To run with that, James Joyce’s letters (even
the dirtiest ones) don’t have the value of that lodestar Ulysses (1922);
Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954)are very beautiful but I doubt
will accumulate enough clout to overtake his other work (nor should they, I
think). These are very narrow examples,
of course, but I think for you to give the tendency of your thoughts (The Simon
Tendency) more power there needs to be larger theory of the case, and more
luggage inside that case.

Yrz,

J.S.L.

* Not in a calculated impact way, but I do think that advocacy of
reading and literature as such could play a larger role in what departments do.
Maybe. My thoughts are hazy as a Pea Souper, or Air
Gravy.

** This description of Woolf’s diary is so great that it needed to
be here, and it felt relevant to what you’re thinking about. From A Writer’s Diary (1954): 'What
sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something
loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything,
solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble a deep old desk,
or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without
looking them through. I should like to
come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted
itself and refined itself and collapsed, as such deposits so mysteriously
do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet
steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.'

Tuesday, 10 January 2017

It’s beginning to feel a little like this
conversation is an elaborate ruse designed to induce me to spend whatever
meagre resources remain once my bookie’s had his share on esoteric volumes of
which I had hitherto been ignorant, and if I wasn’t already convinced of your
near-saintly moral decorousness, I would suggest you were in cahoots with the
online bookmongering behemoths, all in the name of making a quick buck in the
run up to Winterval. But that’s obviously gibberish (with a hard G, in
honour of Evelyn Waugh).

So: with regards academic writing style, I would
have to agree with you. Steven Pinker – he of the interesting theories of
mind and language, and the wild, Simon Rattlish shock of silvery hair – has
written extensively on this subject, and I would wager more eloquently and
learnedly than myself, so I will just alert you to an excellent article,
available as a pdf on his homepage, entitled ‘Why Academics Stink At Writing’
(which you can read here: http://stevenpinker.com/why-academics-stink-writing),* and leave the matter there. The
need on the part of literary criticism to follow a pseudo-scientific mode of
knowledge creation and dissemination – pseudo both in the sense of being
a pastiche of scientific methods and codes, and in the sense that it’s an
unnecessary, and ersatz import from a field that works in a very different way
to the humanities – is probably, at least in part, the product of a degree of
insecurity. (The concomitant rise in a socially responsive, explicitly
partisan mode of criticism is arguably symptomatic of this, too.) It’s
easy to point to the applications and impact of research in the sciences in a
concrete way that’s simply not possible to the same extent if we apply
comparable terms to the humanities, so different methods of gauging ‘impact’
and ‘importance’ need to be delineated. It’s rather a circular process,
isn’t it? Literary academics (or perhaps more correctly, examples of the
slightly over-egged, straw-stuffed stereotype we’ve managed to conjure up
between ourselves) feel the need to bolster the perceived seriousness of their
work with semi-comprehensible jargon, but in the process manage to radically
denude their potential audience, so the seriousness and import of their work –
whether real or cosmetic – becomes, if you will, academic. No-one will
ever know, except other researches in the same field writing more or less the
same thing about the same subjects for the same journals.

Puerile caricature of academia that may well be,
but the sentiment underpinning it – scepticism, if not outright hostility, to
the kind of dry-as-dust criticism that academia, more often than not, tends to
produce – is genuine. Moreover, given that this has gone hand in hand
with an increasing distaste, or boredom at any rate, for the mechanics of
outright fiction, my reading, almost by default, has swung towards the essay
and its cousins. I think I like the mess – the muddle, yes, that’s
absolutely right – and uncertainty that define these works (though I perhaps
wouldn’t go so far as to employ ‘brokenness’ as one of my favoured descriptors,
because so long as a mind can communicate, even if what’s being communicated
may seem confusing and chaotic at first, nothing’s really broken): mess and
uncertainty that seem, for the most part, to be ruthlessly excluded from the
boundaries of, on the one hand, the ‘rigorous’ academic monograph, and the
well-made novel on the other.

As to the matter of thought: yes, I entirely
agree that it’s too limited, too straight-jacketing a term to properly
encompass and communicate everything that I think I find in these
border-hugging books. There’s a quote from one of Elizabeth Bishop’s
letters, which I sort of carry around in my brain at all times as a point of
contact and inspiration (though it’s half remembered, and although I could
easily use the wonder of Wikipedia and clarify the line and provide a proper
citation, I’m choosing not to, partly out of laziness, partly out of
stubbornness, and partly out a misplaced desire to give some impression of what
I mean by a text that acknowledges its own ‘thinkiness’ in the process of its
making),** which, paraphrased, goes along the lines of: “I tend to favour works
which provide not the finish of a completed thought, but the ragged process by
which such a thought came about.” Of course, that’s probably completely
wrong – E-Bish is usually a lot more lucid than that, I’m sure of it – but the
sentiment’s a good one, and one with which I concur.

This all chimes in with an increasing sense I have
that the real work of literature tends to be happening in the sidelines.
By this I don’t mean to suggest some quasi-utopian fantasy, where every
bedroom’s hiding a starveling, scribbling Tolstoy-in-waiting (though that might
well be the case: who knows?), but rather that the real work by writers who are
already established, or who might become established in the future, resides in
the interstitial, the neglected, the seemingly-inconsequential. Thus:
Thoreau’s journals are more valuable than Walden; Virginia Woolf’s
diaries have a greater, or at least equal, claim on posterity than her novels;
in decades to come, people are going to remember Simon Gray and Alan Bennet at
exemplary diarists who wrote the occasional play (the last of these three
examples is arguably already true, which may or may not undermine my
argument). I’m saying this not to be controversial (well, maybe a
little): this is simply the direction my thoughts – coupled to my reading –
have been tending towards. I wouldn’t be so bold as to translate my own
idiosyncrasies as a reader into a manifesto,*** but it’s good way to get a
conversation going.

Yrs, as ever,

ST

*I think some of the ideas and critiques in this
article were later expanded into book-length form in The Sense of Style,
an excellent and lucidly written writing guide which J-Pillz may want to add to
his library of same.

**If not ‘thought’, then ‘self-consciousness’ or,
maybe, just good old fashioned ‘pretentiousness’ might well do in its
stead.

Sunday, 8 January 2017

One might argue that the reason for literary
criticism being outside the mess and stuff (what Forster might call muddle) of
life is partly to do with an aping of science. It is to do with it not being a specific I who
writes, but an I who writes who could be You or Anyone who had the language and
thought to write it. It is positing an
objectivity. It commands the authority
of the objective. It is the passive observer
making observations and noting down these observations for all to read, and by all,
the observer means one’s peers: other observers who speak the same jargon-laden
language. The critic has left the
building and the machine, this machine named One or The Observer might be left
to perform the exact measurements, and detect the patterns needed to generate
the thesis, to process it, and print it out to send to the right journal (so it
might fulfil its REF obligations), and so be read by other machines.

Do you see?

One of the earliest texts (in a way) that resembles
what you describe is Rene Descartes’ Meditations – that series of
reflections and self-experiments that foreground his thinking about his own
thinking. Indeed, he believes to affirm
his knowledge of his own existence upon this thinking: Cogito ergo sum
and additional jazz. But I submit that
you are overemphasising the word thought in your designation of what you
call the thinkerly text. One
doesn’t want (perhaps) it to be like a maths problem, in which one has simply
filled the box marked ‘Show your Working’, but rather as something that also
shows the force and the emotional intensity that motivates, and is part of,
their thought.*

Don’t you feel?

Because this is how the writer truly steps through,
smashes the experimental glass that might separate her from her life, her from
us. Or, indeed, him. Because let us be specific here. One essayist possibly of interest to you is
Thomas Glave – I have his collection Among the Bloodpeople (swing by and
I’ll lend it to you) – and his writing is frequently visceral, intensely
personal. He has style and knows how to
use it. He has total command of the
interiority that modernism gifted us in the last century. He smashes the glass and through the
spiderwebbed chaos and shards come thoughts and feelings: on the murder of
queer Jamaican men, on joy and writing, on James Baldwin. But to steer it from essays alone and over to
fiction: David Markson in his Wittgenstein’s Mistress shows in
accumulating fragments the thoughts and feelings of a woman who appears to be
the last person living on Earth. The
same applies to what Tyler Malone calls Markson’s Notecard Quartet of
novels: Reader’s Block, This is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point and The
Last Novel, all of which
sift through the detritus of world culture (largely anecdotes and facts about
major writers and other figures), and foreground the making of themselves in
ways that are strangely moving. I would
also include Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story, her only novel to date, which
both shows the creation of the novel, and the thought and feeling that
assembles it, with her characteristic attention to the process that a mind goes
though. Her novel, like Dept of
Speculation, is about a break up. (Maybe in shrugging off linearity you
have invited circularity?) A lot of the
suggestions that are coming up do seem to be about brokenness, endings,
disappearances. What you seem to be
asking for is both for the writer to there, present, but also to be uncertain,
to be restless and questing, perhaps without ever finding what they set out to
find. Put overly poetically,
anyway.

But – to draw you too through the glass (do be
careful where you step) – why? Not that
I disagree, per se. But what is it about
uncertainty that appeals? Why – one might say – do you ask of this thinkerly
text a tentativeness? Even, maybe
(though this perhaps comes from me rather than you), a brokenness?

Ask I.

*You do use the word ‘living, breathing, feeling
human being’, but I wanted to make a point about emphasis. Nor do I want to deny the thrill that the
cerebral has, but the word ‘thought’ alone doesn’t convey this, I don’t feel.

P.S.

I didn't know this – and oh, the cover of that
collection is wonderful.

Friday, 6 January 2017

Thanks for the reply: I feel like you've left your
brain open for me to rummage around in with impunity, with a sign propped up
next to the open door saying "Please Feel Free to Rummage in This
Brain", which was what I was hoping would be the case. There's
plenty there for me to get my teeth into - in your reply, not your brain: I'm
not a monster! - and, in a move that will seem, I'm sure, increasingly typical
of my wayward and intransigent methods as this conversation unfolds, my
own reply is going to start at the end of yours and work
backwards. Have at you, linearity!

First, the matter of the reading diary. At
the moment, it's rather a simple beast: taking the form of a list - I like
lists - of what I have read, with bracketed information regarding when I
started and when I finished the book, with some other slightly obsessive bits
of code to let me know whether I'm re-reading a particular book [because I'm of
an age where I need typographical confirmation of this, apparently]; whether I
gave up in frustration [and, perhaps, what form my frustration took: fire,
window, canal, shotgun, etc]; whether it's an intermittent, etiolated reading
[this is true of anthologies or collections of essays, usually]; and
no doubt ever more complicated subcategories of marginalia I haven't even
thought up yet, as the diary continues on its merry. A while back I used
to keep a more substantial reading journal, which is a very different
beast, involving brief comments and critiques on whatever I happened to be
reading at the time, but found it was slowing me down; and besides, comment's
best expressed immediately in the margins of a book, or flung out into the
ether via email or blogpost or good old fashioned green crayon.

I very much enjoyed Offill's book, too, though
what I've read of her first novel hasn't grabbed me quite so spectacularly (I
imagine that's more my problem than hers, as I favour the kind
of fractured, essayistic, semi-autobiographical form, of which Dept.
of Speculation is a perfect example; Last Things, on the other
hand,is, in the parlance of our time, a trifle more 'convench').
My method with novels that've been praised to the skies and back is to wait a
little while - usually eighteen months of so - after initial publication
and, when the critical dust has settled, read them as cold as possible
(obviously an impossibility, as we're not in France, and our fiction
paperbacks don't possess the blank white imperturbability of a modernist
art gallery's dazzling edifice). This usually - though not always -
results in me enjoying a book more than I no doubt would have done if
I'd approached it hot off the press, as I tend to immediately distrust any
cultural production that's received pretty much universal approbation.
(Yes, I know, I'm a surly and contrarian little munchkin, ain't I?)

"Tentativeness is a good disguise for
vagueness": my PhD supervisor was constantly having to tell me not to use
the word 'tentative' or its correlatives in my writing, as it made it look
like I didn't have confidence in my ideas. In fairness, I didn't,
but you don't let the other guy know that, right? I've now, as a result
of that advice, swung wildly in the other direction, to the point where I'm
positively obnoxious and over-confident in my sweeping generalisations,
which will no doubt prove my downfall, as and when. More seriously,
though, and coming on to the meat of your reply / open-door brain: the
kind of criticism you're describing (even if it doesn't exist at the moment)
feels precisely like the kinds of
impossible-to-categorise-or-find-an-appropriate-shelf-for-in-the-bookshop books
that I've been jonesing for lately. What I really loved about Dept. of
Speculation - I have read other books, obviously, but it's better to
have a concrete example to hand than to fumble around in generalities -
was the way its intellect, its learning, its thought, was
nestled into the stuff and mess of life. Was inextricable from the stuff
and mess of life, in fact. That's precisely what's lacking in traditional
jargon-clotted 'serious' criticism: that sense of a living, breathing, feeling
human being hovering behind the words.

I suppose that's a way of acknowledging that
I'm hungry for some kind of authorial presence in a way that's all
very unfashionable and pre-Barthesian, etc, etc, but it's an element of my
reading tastes that there's no point supressing. I dig style, and there's
nothing better in this world than a well-turned sentence, and all style really
is, to my mind, is an analogue for character, or personality. In the
absence of an author's physical presence, the paper-bound illusion of
their presence, which is what style strives towards, will more than
suffice. Like you, I've been (re)reading Zadie Smith lately as well -
God, I'm so hip: I could have been The Believer's online
content editor circa 2007; I bet I listen to the Decembrists, too -
though in my case it's her actual essays, rather than a
Forster-worshipping novel that sounds like it might be an essay. Anyway,
in her essay on Nabakov and Barthes, Z-Smithz (oops, I did it again) discusses
Barthes' twin notions of the 'readerly' and the 'writerly' text: "Readerly
texts ask little or nothing of their readers; they are smooth and fixed in
meaning and can be read passively (...) By contrast, the writerly
text openly displays its written-ness, demanding a great effort
from its reader, a creative engagement. In a writerly text the
reader, through reading, is actually reconstructing the act of writing
[...]." (Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays [London:
Penguin, 2009]: 48.) Smith does a great job of elucidating Barthes’ ideas
here, and the whole maelstrom of post-structuralism more generally: she's
clear, she's concise, she's stylish. But I can't be the only one thinking
there's a missing element to Ronnie's schema: what about the thinkerly
text? A book, of whatever form, that eschews both of the textual
extremes that Barthes is positing, and is interested primarily in
showing the process of thought: that foregrounds its own making (like the
writerly text can be said to do), but in a manner than emphasises process
over product; the journey, and not the destination. That is
capable of being in uncertainties, and so forth. I've come to the
conclusion that the form which most closely resembles this third way is
the essay. (Though I should obviously never deploy the phrase
'third way' ever again, because of the overt Blairy-Cleggy overtones, but
nonetheless, I think my point still stands.)

Yours,

Simon

P.S. Thanks for the heads up on Marshall Berman:
he's been mentioned to me by others (and by others, I mean George, naturally:
my limited social purview makes Ted Kaczynski look like Nancy Mitford) as
someone I'd enjoy. FYI, did you know that Verso are publishing a
collection of his essays in March of next year? Yes indeed they
are.

Wednesday, 4 January 2017

What is life, in fact, but a
(dis?)organised digression? In answer to
your question, I’m reading/recently read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005)
– a novel with a title that makes it sound like it’s an essay,
right? As you probs know, the book is based on my literary boyfriend’s best
work Howards End (1910), and it was, frankly, a joyful read. Both that novel, and its antecedent, feel like
the perfect anodyne for these divisive times where two very different worlds
are forced (imperfectly and with difficulty) to connect. Smith has moved the
action, broadly, to a campus of a US university in which the two contrasting
worlds are headed (ish) by the liberal professor Howard Belsey, and on the other
side a cultural conservative critic Monty Belsey (a kind of Clarence
Thomas/Roger Scruton figure).

It, alongside your current predilection for
non-fiction, made me think of a long distant time (maybe three years ago, alas
when I was young, alas) in the run up to my MA when I was (do you detect
here the tell-tale shimmer of a flashback?: there I am, rifling through various
tomes on the third floor of the Warwick University Library, comparing the
classmarks on the spines to those scrawled on a scrap of paper) thinking
about the possibility of what seemed (in my view at that time) to have fallen
away in the academy: a liberal criticism in the tradition of
Arnold, Mill, Trilling, of Forster himself (I imagine it would have drawn on
figures like Dewey, Rorty, Nussbaum also). I was interested in a criticism that didn’t
clatter and clank with jargon (though wasn’t anti-intellectual), was deeply
felt and thought, that was aware of the beautiful, and of a public beyond
simply others working in literature departments, and the promotion of reading
more generally. It would have the joyful
enthusiasm of Marshall Berman’s work. It
would have been imaginative (I have almost always preferred the writing of
novelists on other novelists). It would
definitely have been mindful of the penultimate sentence of the introduction to
Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950): ‘The job of criticism
would seem to be then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination
of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and
difficulty.’

Now, don’t ask me what all that looks like in
practice. My life digressed into other things, or that was a digression from
those other things, and I returned unto those things. All I write about this is tentative as a) it
was wrested and rescued through the flicker and shimmer of a flashback heat
haze, b) my past self, as much as my current self, was a moron, c)
tentativeness is a good disguise for vagueness.

Yourz vaguely,

James

P.S.

Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation is
great.

P.P.S.

What does keeping a reading diary strictly involve?
Or what is your approach to it?

Monday, 2 January 2017

So: here we are. Apologies that I never
got around to producing that list of "my favourite books ever", or
whatever it was I'd quite gotten myself signed up for, but I realised
there were a number of obstacles to my ever finishing something like
a definitive or even functional list of that kind. First, I'm
congenitally lazy - "an excellent student out of school", I think the
saying goes - which means I tend to run in terror (or, if not terror, apathy)
from anything that even mildly resembles homework. Second, and
more importantly, I'm a voracious, addicted reader, which means every time
the list might seem to be coming to a conclusion, some new literary
enthusiasm would likely hove into view on the horizon to disrupt my dreams of teleological
perfection. I've taken to keeping a reading diary - a pretty
comprehensive one, too - to try and even some of these problems out, but
in the short term, what this all comes down to is: there's no list as
yet. Sorry.

But I'm of the old fashioned opinion that problems
and failures are really nothing of the kind, but represent, rather,
opportunities in occluded form. Hence this email: I'm far more taken
with the idea of producing a prolonged exchange of ideas and enthusiasms for
semi-public consumption on Gists and Piths, which is partly
due, I'll admit, to a combination of shame and envy - shenvy? - towards
George's productive capacities of late. Shame, because I don't
want him to feel he has to do all the literary grunt-work in the absence of
any viable contribution from me; and envy due to the gently combative,
McCartney-Lennon-esque relationship I have with the Ttooulster, whereby we
each keep driving the other to greater, more demented heights of
creativity. (Which suggests, if you're of a pessimistic
persuasion, that I've still got my own 'Frog Chorus' waiting
impatiently to be born; whilst George is only three steps away from the
conceptualist excesses of 'Revolution 9', and has a full decade
of over-eager confessional poetry and primal screaming to look forward
to. Woohoo!)

As this is our first foray into the world of
G&P 'Conversation Pieces' (c), I thought it best to keep the parameters of
discussion and digression as open as possible: indeed, the more digression, the
better. (What is a conversation, in fact, but an organised digression?)

With that in mind, I'd like to kick things off with
potentially the most open-ended question I could think of (short of "How
are you"): What are you reading at the moment? What's stood out for you,
and why? Actually, that's two questions, but they pertain to the same
subject, so I don't think I'm overstepping trading standards. In the
interests of full disclosure, my own most recent reading (counting back from
the novel I'm currently in the midst of) is as follows:

Michael Ondaatje, 'Coming Through Slaughter'

Eve Babitz, 'Slow Days, Fast Company'

Iris Owens, 'After Claude'

Sarah Manguso, 'The Guardians' + 'The Two Kinds of
Decay'

Renata Adler, 'Speedboat'

David Shields, 'Remote'

Jenny Offill, 'Dept. of Speculation'

Christy Wampole, 'The Other Serious'

(Lots of essays there, and what fiction there is,
for the most part, looks like anything but fiction. Read into that what
thou wilt).

WELCOME TO GISTS AND PITHS

A Japanese poetry student of Ezra Pound's, on being asked what makes a poem, responded "It should contain gists and piths."Gists and Piths is a blog dedicated to the discussion and publication of contemporary poetry, fiction, film, visual art, and everything in between. Here you'll find book reviews, interviews, enraged post-modernist manifestoes, long-form essays and much more.